Early this morning, Nintendo held a special Nintendo Direct that covered some new info on Pokémon X and Y for the Nintendo 3DS. Nintendo president Satoru Iwata was not alone in this Direct, instead he was joined by The Pokémon Company Int'l president Tsunekazu Ishihara and Game Freak’s Junichi Masuda. This was a much shorter Nintendo Direct, clocking in at twenty minutes.
The trio started the Direct by Reminiscing shortly about the technology that Game Freak used from the original Pokémon Red and Green (Red and Blue in America) to the Nintendo DS installments. Mainly how people had to connect with one another using the Game Boy’s link cable, then with the GBA Wireless Adaptor, then finally the Internet.
The history lesson was a segue way to the announcement of two applications for Pokémon X and Y. First is the Pokémon Bank, which allows you to save Pokémon on the cloud. The Pokémon Bank can hold one hundred in-game boxes worth of Pokémon, which tallies to 3000 different monsters. Secondly, the Poké Transporter application is bundled with Pokémon Bank and will allow you to transfer your Pokémon to X and Y from the fifth generation Pokémon titles, Pokémon Black, Pokémon White, Pokémon Black 2 and Pokémon White 2 into the Pokémon Bank. The goal for these two apps is to make them easy and convenient for the end user, and it no longer required having two systems to transfer them. The applications will not be available at launch, and Iwata has confirmed however that the Pokémon Bank will have an annual fee (though it will have a free trial). The Pokémon Bank will be released on December 25th for 500 yen in Japan to download from the eShop, but the Western launches as well as the annual fee are still unknown.
For the first time in Pokémon history, one of your friends in the game will give you your first Pokémon instead of the professor. Instead, Professor Sycamore will later end up giving you one of the three original starters: Bulbasaur, Charmander, and Squirtle. Those three Pokémon’s final evolutionary forms, Venusaur, Charizard and Blastoise, will have Mega Evolutions. Like other Mega Pokémon, these newly announced Pokémon will have new abilities. Mega Venusaur will have Thick Fat (lessens blows from Fire and Ice-type moves), Mega Charizard will have Drought (boosts Fire-type moves) and Mega Blastoise will have Mega Launcher (boosts moves with Pulse in the name).
The Mega Evolutions are done with the help of a wristband the trainer wears. The Mega Stone goes into that wristband, so it seems that you can only have the ability to utilize one Mega Pokémon in your party at a time.
Since the game will finally have a worldwide launch, you can select one of the seven languages available with any region of the game.
Right before the Direct ended, Iwata has confirmed that a special edition Nintendo 3DS XL will be released in North America and Europe before the game releases on September 27th. The systems do not have the game bundled with them.
Short but sweet, this Direct really showed off how next-gen these new Pokémon titles are. Game Freak are definitely taking advantage of what they can do on the 3DS and doing things that simply could not be done with the DS, like the use of the Nintendo Network and the connection with secondary apps. Like always, check the Direct below.
